


And After

by regshoe



Category: Raffles - E. W. Hornung
Genre: Future Fic, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-19
Updated: 2018-10-19
Packaged: 2019-08-04 13:17:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16347428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regshoe/pseuds/regshoe
Summary: The ending, at last.





	And After

The rector came to visit me again today. I like him, despite everything; he is a kind young man, and he tries to give me hope. His descriptions of what goes on outside my room, of everything I can no longer go and see for myself, are really lovely. Today, however, he was telling me about heaven (he did not say in so many words, to prepare my thoughts to meet it, but it was what was in his mind). I could picture it: a fair and gentle land, green branches above my head and a warm breeze upon my face, where no care or trouble would ever find me again. But after all these are only idle imaginings, for I cannot really think that it will be so—cannot believe, be it after all these blameless years, that I deserve such an end. In any case, I do not wish it, since he is not there.

But then, that is all I have ever really looked for, since that day on the South African veldt. How many years have passed since then—thirty, forty, fifty? I cannot remember; I have lived through them too long, and I am too weary. And the world has gone turning senselessly on, seeming a more terrible and incomprehensible place every year (though they tell me this last war is over now, and I am glad of that)—the world that does not know or care that it ended years before, with the report of a Boer’s gun. But it will all be right again soon.

I am not afraid. I do not wish for their heaven, but I am not afraid that I will be made to take the other path. The world after this must be wider than those alone (wasn’t there an old song that said as much? I cannot recall). I thought, in my younger and guiltier years, that I would be so condemned, but I find it is not so. Instead I see him before me, clearer than I have done in years of memories, walking over the rooftops of London beneath a sky brilliant with stars, or else sitting beside the old window at the Albany with the same sky outside, just as he used to. Those lights go on forever now; but there is no street below, no glittering world treacherous with wonder, no call to a foreign war to take him away from me. 

He is coming to me, now, over the leads, and I sit beside a chimney-stack and wait for him. There is time to wait; we will never want for time here. I see him, now, just as he was in those too short days, eyes cast up to the sky and smiling the smile I still remember better than any, tumbled hair dark against the greater darkness of the night. He comes to me and I meet him, and he takes my outstretched hand. There is a path leading away from the chimney-stacks where I rested; it winds on into the distance, and I cannot see the end of it, but there we go, together, as we may be in this world for all the time we would have.


End file.
